post christmas laziness

I trust everyone has been enjoying their holidays! Today has been filled with glorious lounging around, with some minor cooking thrown in for good measure. I had intended to make a vegetable pot pie to bring to family for Christmas day, but I wound up in bed all day with a migraine instead. Fun times! Today has been much better. In fact, it feels like my head was chopped off, and I sprouted a new, pain-free one. What relief. And how 'bout that imagery, huh?

So I made this pot pie today:





I didn't follow a recipe for this, except for the top crust. The crust is the basic pie crust from The Joy of Vegan Baking. The filling includes all local veggies from our last Vegetable Husband shipment, sweet potatoes, parsnips, and collard greens.

Yum! This made a great lunch!

the husband.

Vegetable Husband, that is. This week's shipment was a doozie:



Huge chinese cabbage, bok choy, onions, butternut squash, cilantro, carrots, mixed greens & collards. The cabbage and bok choy were promptly thrown into a stir fry, along with a couple of the cute little carrots. The cats were OBSESSED with the leafy carrot tops on these, too. Moe was putting his face right in, purring at them and chewing away. Miles was trying to rip them from the counter top.

Bratty Miles, playing with the carrot:



Moe, all mad at me after I cut their tops off:



Silly kitties.

Vegan Chicken Parm Sammie

We have been too busy with work to even breathe, but damn if I didn't make time to create a fatty amazing dinner last night!
Here we have a Vegan Chicken Parmesan Sandwich. It's stuffed with Mozzarella Teese and topped with pizza sauce & Parma, in case you were wondering:



Here's the deal. I saw that Laura stuffed some Match Meat, so I had to copy her (again). She's fun to copy. And we are huge fans of the Match Meat vegan products already, so this just had to happen. Here's the recipe, which I cannot recommend enough.

Vegan Chicken Parm
serves 4 little mouths or 2 big mouths

1 lb. Match Ground "Chicken", thawed
1/2 cup grated Mozzarella Teese
2 Tbsp Chik-Style Seasoning, or other vegan "chicken style" seasoning
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp black pepper
1 cup unsweetened soy milk
2 cups panko breadcrumbs
2 Tbsp brown mustard
oil for frying

Firstly, heat up your skillet over medium heat.
Clean an area on your counter to spread out the Match Meat. A large, flat surface is best. Roll out the Match "chicken" into a large rectangle about 1/4" thick. Sprinkle about half of the seasonings over the Match Meat evenly, patting it in here and there. Flip your rectangle, and season up the other side.

Sprinkle the grated Teese over one side of the rectangle. Fold over your rectangle, sandwiching the Teese in the middle. Press the ends of the rectangle shut, and evenly cut into four equal-ish squares. Set aside.

In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the soy milk with the mustard. In a second bowl, pour in the breadcrumbs. Dip each square into the soy milk mixture, then into the breadcrumbs, coating evenly. Toss into the hot skillet, and continue with the rest of your pieces. Brown evenly on each side, then serve on a bun with pizza sauce of your choice. This is great without a bun, too.

Pizza Fusion in ATL

Ken and I go anywhere there's good vegan pizza to be had. We heard that a new pizza chain called Pizza Fusion recently opened up in Atlanta, so we headed out to Buckhead to try it.



The first thing we noticed was the restaurant space. It is big, dimly lit, clean and comfortable. The place is huge, and the tables are spaced well enough apart that you wouldn't be all up in your neighbors business should the place get crowded. Our server explained that the entire space was built in an eco-friendly manner, from the type of flooring and paint, to the tables and recycled plastic chairs. Pretty cool! The servers all wore shirts that read "My Carbon Footprint is Smaller than Yours", which struck us as funny and kind of smug. Especially since Pizza Fusion serves up plenty of "happy meat". They best stay out of the business of our carbon footprint.

But anyway. On to the food. The food Pizza Fusion serves is 75% organic, which is great (and rare) for a pizza joint. We knew from looking at the PF website that their dough and sauce is vegan, and that they offer a vegan soy cheese. We placed an order for a pizza with soy cheese and a variety of toppings. Individual toppings here are $2 each, so that really added up. But we knew going in that Pizza Fusion was a bit more expensive than the average pizza place, which is completely understandable considering the cost of organic food. The only price I really couldn't wrap my head around was the $2 it cost to add roasted garlic to our pie. The garlic really should have been slathered on there for that price, which it wasn't.

But the pizza overall! It was really, really delicious. We completely devoured it.



The pizza had a thin, slightly chewy crust that was to die for. The soy cheese melted great in the pizza oven, and the caramelized onions we ordered as a topping added to the yum factor tremendously. I have no complaints about this pizza at all. It was smaller than we thought it was going to be, but after we had eaten it all, we decided that it was probably the right size for us not to have overindulged like we would have on a typical pizza.

And they offer a vegan, gluten free chocolate brownie for dessert. Can't say no to that, eh?



Actually, we probably will say no to the brownie next time. It tasted pretty old, like perhaps it had been frozen for a while, then heated up in the oven. The edges were crunchy and stale, while the middle was mushy. Ah, well. Maybe they will consider offering vegan baked goods made locally sometime in the future, to avoid the staleness.

But the organic, vegan pizza and the comfortable atmosphere will definitely bring us back to Pizza Fusion. Check it out sometime!

boring ol' vegetables, that's all.

Hey buddies. Long time no see, eh? Sorry about that. We have been very busy at work with the holiday season and all, that cooking has become very uncreative. Our evenings after work the past few weeks have pretty much consisted of us rolling into the driveway around 9:00pm, feeding the yelling kitties, then boiling some water and shoving food into our maws as quickly as possible before going to sleep.

I am so glad we signed up for the CSA Vegetable Husband this winter! It really has saved us from eating like complete crap during the cold weather. Especially because it's delivered right to us each week. Over the past four weeks, we have had a good variety of local veggies and even a few fruits. Such as:

broccoli greens
collard greens
sweet potatoes
apples
butternut squash
persimmons
green onions
brussel sprout greens
kale
rainbow chard
sage
butter crunch lettuce
mixed baby lettuce
...and more! VH has really made life much easier. All we have to do is a quick stir fry and serve over rice, or puree a squash soup, or wash a fast salad and we are fed and finished. Or something easy and amazingly tasty like this:



That's pasta in a creamy garlic sauce, with Soy Curls and broccoli greens. The mozzarella rolls are an idea I got from Laura. It's an herbed pizza dough, with garlic and Teese rolled up and baked. Have mercy!

I hope to cook some more goodies soon. In the mean time, I will leave you with Miles being cute.